Odyssey Toys’ Pocket Drone is one of the most compact flying machines we’ve ever encountered. We spoke with Odyssey’s Vice President Steven Irigoyen on the floor at CE Week to learn a bit more about it.
True to its name, the Pocket Drone fits easily in your pocket, and is about the size and shape of an iPhone when collapsed. The remote control is about the same size, and similarly collapses down, with interior storage for the removable control stick. Both fit into a pouch that Irigoyen pulls easily out of his blazer’s inside pocket.
It takes only a minute to unfold the drone’s four small rotors from its corners and assemble the control before it’s zipping around our heads. In flight, it can be set to maintain altitude, making it particularly easy for novice pilots to get off the ground and stay there. On board, it has an 8GB memory card to hold HD video and 2.3 MP pictures taken with its front-mounted camera.
There are smaller drones out there, but none to our knowledge that are as easy to fly, record high-quality pictures and video, and cost just $100. Odyssey’s Pocket Drone is available now through Sharper Image, with wider distribution to come.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.